Endless Masquerading
by Phoenix To Flame
Summary: There is always a second chance to love. Sometimes it just takes years and years, and pain and trust and fear before awakening. SubaruxKakyou


I really do have this strange love for SubaruxKakyou that I have no idea _where_ or _why_ it exists. This, plus Neverending Story, are starting to turn into prequels for a much longer idea, that probably won't be expanded on for a little while, the least of which being that this is the last day I have access to this computer for a while. So everything else is going to be put on hold.

All that you really need to know in order to get the context of this, is that all the other Dragons have died, whether in battles or from other causes unrelated to the end of the world, and Subaru and Kakyou are the only ones left. Also, there's something wrong with the World now, and no one can reincarnate, meaning they are trapped in their essentially immortal roles. Subaru started to talk to Kakyou, in dreams, and then balked when he realized that he'd fallen in love again against all odds. This is the last piece of that prologue, even though the earlier parts are as of yet unwritten.

The poetry framing the story is T.S Eliot, and not me.

* * *

><p><em>Let us go then, you and I,<br>When the evening is spread out against the sky  
>Like a patient etherized upon a table;<em>  
><em>Let us go through, certain half-deserted streets<br>The muttering retreats  
>Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels<br>And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells  
>Streets that follow like a tedious argument<br>Of insidious intent  
>To lead you to an overwhelming question...<br>Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"_

* * *

><p>A thousand birds fluttered to the sky, in a deserted park. It was cold, but not freezing. The ground was bare, and solid. It was free of human life, as it always was.<p>

He liked it that way.

He walked along the bare ground, a shadow in black, not looking at the crows that circled the sky before landing in the empty trees again.

One of them landed on his shoulder, cocking a psychic eye at him.

He didn't move, just let it sit there, sooty shiny black.

It cawed at him once, and hopped to his gloved hand, claws sinking into the thick fabric. Then it began to preen, utterly content with its situation in life.

He envied it.

A chill wind blew through the empty park, stirring pixie-cut black hair softly, like a caress.

He shut his eyes, let the breeze pass on by.

Everything else did.

He knew who was standing there without opening his eyes, knew the other man would be a picture in white, with long white hair tumbling down around his waist, the color leeched away from him when he replaced the two-faced dreamseer. "I like it here." He said dully, with a heavy lack of emotion to go with it.

"You're still wasting your time." The other man said with the weariness of one who had seen a thousand futures. And he had. "There are better things to dream of."

The crow let out a harsh cry, flying away to the gray sky. "I know there are better things. But everything I loved has crashed to the ground. Like that bird."

Somewhere not too far away, the crow that had found him, smacked into a power line and tumbled to the earth, smooth black feathers to a rumpled mess.

"I wouldn't fall, not like them." He said, bitterly, so icily bitter. "You know this. You wanted it before, so why not now?"

"What makes you think I don't want it?" He retorted, a fine line of annoyance entering his voice, opening mismatched eyes to stare at the dreamwalker. "I just realized that I was going to end up with you walking in my nightmares as well, one more sacrifice to the sakura."

"Would you have said that even a year ago?" the man replied, voice from bitter to soothing, like a bad dream to good. "Would then, you searching to find a reason to _live_ instead of just enduring have stopped you?"

He opened his mouth to answer, and stopped, because there was none that was not a lie.

"You know that I'm the same as you." he continued, running a slender hand over long hair that draped over his shoulders. "You said it yourself, 'Why wallow in bitterness when there is always another way?' There is always another way."

He didn't want to face that, to end up waking to nightmares of fine hair that was spattered in blood, forgiving eyes dull and dead. "I've already killed enough people, whether through my actions or not mine. I won't have you there too."

"_Subaru._" the name without an honorific drew his head up, startled, wary. "Stop running. You made me stop, so I'll catch you."

He laughed darkly. "If you do, I'll end up waking up from a blank spot with my hand through your heart."

"And that would be only a temporary pain. I cannot die till the next Dreamseer is born." He walked forwards, white robes fluttering. "You cannot be the Dreamseer, I cannot be the Sakurazukamori."

A cool hand rested on his head, all the forgiveness of the world that he never deserved. "How do you _know_ that is how it will be?" he asked, all the bitterness in his throat broken to pieces, that caught and clogged like swallowed glass. "How do you know that you won't die, just like _them_?"

He was wrapped in white robes, not blinding, but white all the same. "I know because the World showed me. I know because I've seen it. I know because I know."

He laughed, brokenly. "You're talking like the World now." he said, sheltered from the shrieking crows and sobbing winds. "How do I know you aren't?"

"Because the World can't get here. Only I." the man replied calmly. "Don't blame yourself for their decisions, their choices. They both had a point where it could have gone differently, and they chose you over all else."

After four hundred years of that, he didn't cry anymore, but the feeling inside was the same. "If I hadn't been here, they would still be." he said at last, the very truth he believed as much as he breathed.

"Would they have, really?" and damn that voice of reason. "Yes, maybe they wouldn't have died to give you a longer life, but how would you know that their lives would have been longer? To live is to die, and all the difference is what you do with your time before it's over."

"Spoken like a dreamseer." he said forlornly, and the man laughed in his chest, the feeling vibrating them both. "What if you do die?"

"Then I'll have died living at last." there was nothing less than certainty and love filling those words."Hokuto-san told me to stop dreaming and wake up before I'd lived out all the time I had left lost in the past. I think it's time you do the same."

He stood at last, still fragile enough to hide from the world with his face in those white robes. The crows overhead took to the airs again, their harsh cries a melody in this wasteland. "I'm not worth it, I'm not strong." he said shakily, holding onto the other man and his unexpected warmth. "I'm not worth all the pain you'll feel from being around me."

Fine long hair swayed under the slow puffs of his breath, youthful for all its lack of color. "I can say the same thing. I forgive you for your weakness, for your strengths. I forgive you for your fears, your tears, your lost years. I forgive you for everything you've ever done that you regretted and everything you will do."

And he was safe at last, in those arms, with the last one who understood, the _only_ one who understood. "They aren't coming back, are they? The ones who would take our place. I've waited so long...but there's no end, is there?"

"No, there isn't." and those words shouldn't have been so comforting, but they were. Maybe because it was a certainty in the chaos of the future. "We're the last there'll ever be. We're the ones who will see through to the end of days. We end with the World."

He laughed again, but there was no humor. "At least we'll be together."

"Yes, we will be." again, there was so much certainty and love in that voice that he couldn't help but feel safe, in a way that he'd never felt before. "And I won't ever regret it. Of all the people to walk to the end of time with, I wouldn't want anyone other than you."

"Not even my sister? Not anyone?" It was impossible to believe...but he _wanted_ to.

"No. Not even her. There is a difference between star-bound love and love that grows with all the years. And as broken, as hurt, as _shattered_ as you may be, it is you I want to walk to the end with."

He couldn't say anything. There was a feeling, an impossible feeling, one that he thought had died four hundred years ago, when he became the Sakurazukamori. It swelled within his chest and blotted out the regrets, or blotted over them.

He was _happy_.

"Subaru." that voice was not in this world anymore, but the other. "It's time to wake up."

The park faded around them, and he opened his eyes.

It was time to wake up.

He opened his eyes to the new day.

* * *

><p><em>There will be time, there will be time<br>To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet  
>There will be time to murder and create,<br>And time for all the works and days of hands  
>That lift and drop a question on your plate;<br>Time for you and time for me,  
>And time yet for a hundred indecisions,<br>And for a hundred visions and revisions,  
>Before the taking of a toast and tea.<em>


End file.
